18 Wonder Women of WordPress

One secret sauce of our success is that we have a lot of women.
Jack Ma, Founder, Alibaba Group

What makes WordPress awesome are the people – contributors, users, sharers. While the number of women in WordPress is way less compared to men (just like any other technology), nobody can deny the tremendous value they create for the platform. Open source has created a level-playing field and allowed everyone to shine – purely on their own merit.

This, first ever story of WPMeta.org, celebrates Women of WordPress. A recent special report by CNET called “Solving for XX” states that 30% is the average percentage of women working in tech. But WPMeta wanted to go beyond the usual and collect inspirational stories of women that encourage more women to take up tech.

So over the last six months, we researched, surveyed and interviewed many women in WordPress and collected some really inspirational stories. From that long list, we are finally profiling 18 Women of WordPress here. These women are fantastic developers, leaders, inspirational bloggers and successful entrepreneurs.

Some are known more than others. But they all have extremely vibrant personalities. So, we’ll tell you about their achievements in WordPress, and also share their hobbies and passions beyond WordPress.

You may be a WordPress plugin or theme developer, a consultant or a WordPress user. Read the stories of these 18 women to see what you can achieve with focus and determination. We hope their multi faceted personalities inspire you to excel – not only in technology but also in other areas of life!

Jen is a good cook and baker too!

Jen Mylo

WordPress cat herder, UX goddess and community caretaker

Jen Mylo is no longer doing WordPress (at least for now), but her contributions to WordPress can’t be ignored. Jen has a string of achievements to her name.She has worked with Microsoft, been an information architect, has a background in health care, was on the advisory board of SxSW Interactive and was also the “Master of Suggestion” at Automattic.

Jen led design and user experience for WordPress for over four and half years and even managed the development team. In recent times it was community management, growing contributor ranks and increasing diversity.

Jen’s a mixed bag of experiences and ideas. And that’s what gives her an edge! Jen’s one of the most influential WordPress people around!!

You’d be surprised to learn that she loves baby sea turtles and wishes to make a small pond in her backyard… Now that she has some time for herself, she may actually be working on that project!

Andrea Middleton

Community builder extraordinaire and a task master!

Similar to Jen Mylo, Andrea Middleton is also a Community Organizer at Automattic. Jen has known Andrea for 25 years and passed on the WordCamp baton to her in 2011. Andrea ensures WordCamps around the world see stunning success.She coordinates with local event organizers and ensures everything goes smoothly – from finances to content quality. With the recent announcement of a new organization for WordCamps, her contribution to the community is only going to increase.

Andrea is a certified TESOL instructor and wine educator! (no, she does not teach both of them together ;-)) She wanted to start a wine blog in 2006 and both her best friend and husband suggested using WordPress. The rest, as they say, is history. Marketing, graphic design, photoshop, event planning and project management are some of her master skills. Apart from wine and WordPress, Andrea enjoys sci-fi / fantasy, feminism and Montessori.

And if you were to ask her for her favorite plugin, I’m sure she’d answer CampTix Event Ticketing – the one she uses everyday for WordCamps!

Tammy Lee

Mentor, Developer and 200% WordPress enthusiast

Ladies Learning Code is a non-profit organization established in 2011 to enable women and youth learn coding and expose them to new aspects of technology. Tammy’s been a lead mentor of its local chapter and has taught at national level too.She is an active committee member of the local Social Media Breakfast chapter and she has been a sessional instructor at a local university.

Tammy helped establish a WordPress meet up and feels being able to connect with other WordPress developers in the city is valuable for anyone, no matter if they work for an agency, freelance, are just starting out, or are senior developers. Everybody has to start somewhere! She has learned a lot in her career and is committed to educate and engage the next wave of developers.

As you can see, her favorite side projects actually don’t have her coding very much! That’s because she is surrounded by code all day at Top Draw – fulfilling client goals in a measurable way.

Last year she created a custom plugin for a client that used WordPress Transients API and a SOAP API to significantly improve site speed.

Tammy belongs to the “Pippin Williamson fan club” (we too are big Pippin fans!!) Pippin has managed to create some really great, useful plugins, has created a great business, and his podcast – Apply Filters – that he runs with Brad Tousenard (of WP Migrate DB Pro fame) is one of the few she listens to on a regular basis.

Her favorite plugin is Advanced Custom Fields. ACF is an excellent plugin and Tammy has been able to do some amazing things with it!

When I asked her where she draws the energy and inspiration to do all this that she does, she said: “Make goals. Achieve goals. Profit! I am always happiest when I’m busy. I compete with myself, have an insatiable curiosity, and I love solving puzzles; that’s all the motivation I need!”

Beka Rice

Chemically brilliant, e-commerce superstar

“Being intentional and getting better” is the mantra for Beka Rice. Beka is a content craftsman and behind the very popular “Sell with WP” – a news, reviews, tips, and tutorials site for online businesses running their e-commerce with WordPress.

Beka also manages content for SkyVerge and ShopStorm. SkyVerge has the largest portfolio of WooCommerce extensions and ShopStorm is where they offer Shopify apps. Both companies focus on providing dependable software for eCommerce merchants along with educational tutorials and how-to articles.

Beka’s path towards these jobs was a bit winding… She trained as a chemist and worked in fulfillment for an eCommerce merchant while in college, then taught high school chemistry for 4 years after graduating. On top of it, her 20-year career in softball landed her as a varsity head coach. She found that her non-tech work gives her insights into how she can help eCommerce merchants improve their business and help teams grow and work better together.

Traveling is one of her hobbies, and she’s been to seven countries so far. She’s also an avid reader of both fiction and non-fiction, and loves music – listening, singing, and playing the piano / guitar.

Treating all of WordCamp Portland to Blue Star Donuts was one of the WordPress contributions that made her proud of in 2015! SkyVerge was one of the sponsors for the event, and she feels that sponsoring WordCamps is worth it because, “there are a lot of great people working with WordPress, and we can learn something valuable from each of them”.

Beka has awesome culinary skills – apart from writing and business skills

Celebrating Women in Computing History

at the Computer History Museum, Sillicon Valley

In 1843 a woman contributed what many consider to be the earliest published form of an algorithm. During the Second World War, six women programmed the first general-purpose electronic computer—ENIAC—to calculate ballistics tables for the US Army.

It was a woman who invented one of the first computer compilers and laid much of the groundwork for the popular programming language COBOL. In 1984 a woman co-founded one of the world’s largest and most successful networking companies—Cisco. In 2014 a woman was appointed CEO of YouTube, but not before she excelled as Google’s first marketing manager.

Women have played key roles throughout computer history and continue to shape the industry today. Yet many of their contributions remain undefined, unacknowledged, or both in a field that touts the importance of meritocracy.

The current issue of Core – Computer History Museum’s official magazine, contemplates and highlights the role of creative, driven women in many recent areas of computing. This issue examines those roles through the lenses of business, technology, the economy, philanthropy, and social impact.

The Computer History Museum is a nonprofit organization with a four-decade history as the world’s leading institution exploring the history of computing and its ongoing impact on society. The Museum is home to the largest international collection of computing artifacts in the world, encompassing computer hardware, software, documentation, ephemera, photographs, oral histories, and moving images. Don’t miss a chance to visit the museum the next time you are in the sillicon valley area!

Nile Flores

Writer, Black Belt in Karate, go-getter…

When you speak to Nile Flores you can sense great energy. She’s a trained black belt in karate, plays soccer, dabbles in astronomy, manages her own business of WordPress consulting, runs a podcast, writes some great content and much more.. But above all, she likes to hustle! Working hard, working fast, until she reaches her goal.

Nile took her black belt in Okinawan style martial art in 2014, but she’s doing WordPress for longer. Yet, it’s her love for writing which comes first! Her writing has won her numerous awards and her poetry made way in a few anthology books too. It was only natural that she took to blogging – and then to WordPress.

Nile’s passion to learn and keep growing never stops. That’s why she signed up for a bachelor’s program for e-business at Ashworth University. After completing it, she’ll take up a Masters Program in Marketing – and even a professional graphic design certification!

Nile is a huge believer in giving back to the WordPress community. It is this ‘giving back’ urge that fuels her and has led her to speak across 26 WordCamps all over the United States on topics such as web design, blogging, SEO, plugin development and even theme development. She also runs “All About WordPress” on Facebook, which is over 8,000 WordPress users helping each other and adding value to the community.

When we asked her about her work mantra and philosophy, she said: “you gotta keep hustling. When all is said and done, even with a team or mentors/coaches, you as a business owner are responsible for your brand and product success. It’s a tough route, but if you keep hustling, you will make the right relationships, build a brand, and create a successful product.”

A WordPresser she admires is Matt Mullenweg (who doesn’t!!). She says, “Matt’s been with our community, and has encouraged millions of people to do a lot of great things. Be it sharing their stories by blogging, becoming an online business owner, making money online, promoting open source or just giving back to WordPress. Matt Mullenweg has hustled, changed lives, including my own.”

Julie Kuehl

Community taught woman extraordinaire, bundle of positivity and entrepreneur

Every woman is capable of defending herself but this woman has a certificate to prove it. Yes, Julie Kuehl is another black belt holder in this list – she actually has multiple black belts! (Ask her about her sword!!)Julie is a freelance web developer. She founded straightFORWARD Web Solutions, which recently joined hands with BCom Solutions – a full-service digital marketing and managed technology services company. Julie actively participates in the WordPress community by speaking at WordCamps and meetups and participating in the WordPress.org Training Team.

Not only does she know WordPress well, Julie is also a bit of a gear head. She was once a national expert in the trucking industry and loves to attend car shows and bike rallies. In her spare time, Julie is often seen in her Mustang or on her Harley just like the picture here!

Julie’s mantra is “Life Goes On“. She says “It reminds me that whatever the difficulties, tomorrow will still come and it likely won’t be as bad as the worst case scenario I’m imagining (and even if it is, I’ll survive that too). It also reminds me to get better every day!”

Julie spent several years learning HTML, PHP, CSS, MySQL and WordPress all on her own before attending a WordPress developer training course in Omaha supported by the WordPress community. Julie likes to say, “I’m not self-taught, I’m community-taught.”

Podcasting is another one of Julie’s favorites things to do. She enjoys both hosting as well as being a guest on podcasts. She hosts the (usually) weekly SciFi Tech Talk podcast.

Julie has a hard time choosing which two fellow WordPressers she admires the most – but Kim Parsell and Topher DeRosia deserve a mention (You may also like to read Julie’s essay on Topher’s website HeroPress). Among plugins ‘What the File‘ and among themes ‘Forward Starter’ from Design.org are her favorites.

Mari Kane

Wine, Jazz and WordPress fan

Not only does Mari Kane travel, but she also loves capturing her finds in her camera. Famous for her photography and videography in WordPress, Mari Kane hails from a rather unusual background.Before being a WordPress blogger and web designer, Mari was a wine geek in the Sonoma County. She has worked for over eleven tasting rooms. Wine is quite literally what led her to WordPress. Blogging on her wine site, TastingRoomConfidential.com is how she wandered into the world of WordPress. Blogging led her to web design, consulting and tech. She says, “Not only does wine taste great while blogging, I like to use wine analogies at BlogsiteStudio.com.”

After WordPress and Wine, the thing she loves the most is Jazz. Owing to this love for jazz, Mari is the happiest when Automattic releases a jazz artist named version. She enjoys writing about the life of a jazz artist and anthropomorphize the software so as to compare it with the musician it’s named after. Mari had a complaint that Matt Mullenweg was not picking enough female artists for version names, but happily that complaint ended at WordPress version 4.1 – which was named “Dinah”. Even 4.3 was named “Billie”. Phew, Mari got the Jazz women glory..

Other than jazz artists, Mari also gets some inspiration from Jill Binder – coder and WordCamp Vancouver organizer – and Morten Rand-Hendriksen who could talk PHP to her in a very sexy Norwegian accent all night long!

And just as easy going as Mari is, her philosophy is something we all will agree to. “To make things happen, first get out of bed!”

Did you know?

Women software developers make 81 cents to the dollar men earn doing the same job.

That’s $336 out of a weekly paycheck, which means she gets paid $17,472 less per year.

Narrow the Gap

Insist on equal pay for equal work in your and your loved ones’ workplaces. Talk to employees and employers you know about the pay gap, salary negotiation techniques, and equal pay laws.

Retrieved from Gina Trapani’s Narrow The Gap project. Calculations based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Lisa Sabin-Wilson

Best selling author, entrepreneur

If you ever got yourself a copy of ‘WordPress for Dummies’ or any of the several other books she’s written, you know Lisa has helped millions learn the art of WordPress. She’s working with WordPress since 2003 – after being a nurse for a decade – and her story is nothing short of inspirational!Lisa Sabin-Wilson, a big name in the WordPress Community, is the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of WebDevStudios – a full service WordPress shop serving big brands. Prior to joining WDS, she had founded her own professional design studio in 2004 and made it highly successful.

Her contribution to WordPress doesn’t stop there. Lisa continues educating new and advanced WordPress users at various WordCamps and conferences.

But when she is not working on WordPress, you can find her designing, doing yoga, scuba diving and skiing.

Sarah Gooding

Mighty Journalist

Lisa Sabin-Wilson and Sarah Gooding have a lot of things in common – and one of them is their love for BuddyPress.Sarah Gooding is known for her writing! She is one of the most powerful women journalist in WordPress, covering everything WordPress at WP Tavern – one of the oldest and most notable news site around WordPress.

Sarah started writing on WP Tavern because it was acquired by Audrey Capital (Matt Mullenweg’s venture capital firm, and Sarah’s employer). But she’s been in love with WordPress for a long time before that. Time long enough to cover the whole spectrum of WordPress – from client projects to theme development to news reporting.

When not writing about WordPress, or looking after her newborn, you can find her baking, knitting or chilling out with her Italian Greyhound. Her love for almond milk lattes and green tea is world famous. And she is one gem of a person.

So what’s this WPMeta?

Insightful perspectives on WordPress Community and Ecosystem

WordPress has marvelous people, terrific businesses, beautiful themes, brilliant plugins, thriving community… However due to the vastness of WordPress ecosystem, that awesomeness is widely scattered and many great insights go unnoticed.

WPMeta takes either a top-down or bottom-up approach to different aspects of the WordPress ecosystem with the aim of discovering, sharing and celebrating insights, strategies, people, solutions and initiatives. We want to help grow and make the WordPress ecosystem even more vibrant and awesome.

WPMeta is brought to you from the makers of

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Join VIP list to get exclusive content before everyone else!WPMeta is not a news / aggregation / publishing initiative. It’s not about trending topics or latest updates.

WPMeta stories and tools will be in-depth, well researched and instantly valuable. WPMeta will assist you in gaining unique insights and perspectives on WordPress community and ecosystem.

Carrie Dils

All-round WordPresser

Here’s yet another all-rounder Carrie Dils. She wears many hats – from being a WordPress consultant to developer to speaker and also a teacher.The business of WordPress is a big passion for her and she has a dedicated weekly podcast called officehours.fm entirely to it. This is a great podcast for anyone interested in, or doing a business around WordPress – not only people who want to put WordPress to use.

Carrie also fulfills her job as a teacher at Lynda.com by educating students on how to use the Genesis Framework with WordPress.

Carrie loves the fact that the WordPress community is truly welcoming and has one piece of advice to freelancers – “Meet others either at WordCamps, online/offline or at meetups. Just meet up!” Not just preaching, Carrie very well practices this herself and is a well-known face at WordCamps. No wonder she’s done almost 100 episodes of her podcast with the who’s-who of WordPress world already!

Freelancers consider her as an actual blessing as she dedicates most of her time either writing helpful content, recording really interesting podcasts or simply replying to all the help related emails that flood her inbox.

Carrie is not just about WordPress coaching, she also loves reading books or riding her bicycle in spare time. Things that crack her up are her two rescue labs – one yellow, one black. Sorry, we couldn’t get a picture of this happy frame! But, we managed to sketch a picture of something else she enjoys.. craft beer! Carrie loves catching up with friends over beer. What a nice combination!

Coming back to her achievements, Carrie has come a long way, right from building her first website in 1997 to all the things she manages today. We asked her about a plugin and theme she can’t live without. And she quickly picked the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin and Utility Pro for the Genesis Framework, one of her own creations!

Helen Hou-Sandí

WordPress lead dev, pianist and bundle of energy

Helen is a WordPress lead developer. That’s right. She is one of the most influential women for the future of WordPress.Helen has also been a stand for women and minorities’ equality in the development world. She works as the Director of Platform Experience at 10up – one of the top 5 enterprise level consulting companies in WordPress. Helen is happy doing both front-end and backend development.

Helen is a celebrated collaborative pianist too. She has performed for audiences of thousands in major cities – both in the US and abroad. She also loves cooking and hanging out with her family. Helen has spoken at various WordPress events too, including WordCamp US 2015 Philadelphia.

Rebecca Gill

Marketing Powerhouse

The next woman WordPresser, is Carrie’s favorite, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she is your favorite too. ‘Cause this woman is a marketing powerhouse.The founder of Web Savvy Marketing, Rebecca Gill is also an amazing speaker – often spotted at WordCamps and meetups. She has inspired hundreds of thousands of people.

Rebecca is also an SEO & Social Media expert and manages three workshops – the Social Media Boot Camp, SEO Boot Camp, and Blogging Boot Camp. Her recent contributuion is a new SEO course that covers 85 topics in about 8 hours. Besides that, she also is an active blogger and offers consultancy at Clarity.fm.

Her venture Web Savvy Marketing has served over 85+ countries and 4000+ happy customers. Rebecca’s mantra is simple. She believes in DOING GOOD for her clients, for the WordPress community, and for those around her. She started the company to help people and stays true to that philosophy today – accepting only those clients where they can make a measurable impact.

Rebecca takes special delight in liberating people from bad CMS systems or poorly coded WordPress themes!

Rebecca is influential and who influences her are some big names too. She draws inspiration from Syed Balkhi for affiliate marketing information, from Chris Lema on being a fabulous coach, Karim Marucchi for running an agency, Steve Zehngut as a true client whisperer and Cory Miller for having a world of knowledge on product development.

Amber Weinberg

Learner, clients’ favorite and freelancer

Somebody else who is also known for her client skills in the world of WordPress is Amber Weinberg. Her secret for success is – “stick with good basic principles, and you’ll attract clients like honey.“Amber is also a strong propagator of learning and encourages everyone to keep learning, ALWAYS. Amber’s simple reasoning to this belief is “WordPress changes so much that it’s impossible to stand still for long & not fall behind”

While most of us would either be following latest pop culture / fashion trends during high school, Amber is someone who charted her own course. She started off as a freelancer creating websites in high school and hasn’t looked back since. Her extensive portfolio covers front-end development, WordPress and responsive development. This girl sure loves a good coding challenge!

Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks holds a special place for Amber. His book “Digging into WordPress” has always been a great reference to her. Amber also likes the plugin Advanced Custom Fields Pro but when it comes to themes she prefers to write them from scratch – rather than using ready themes.

Michelle Schulp

WordPress Fan, Graphic Designer and Epic Nerd

Music is universal. And musicians too. One such musician is our next woman WordPresser Michelle Schulp. This pink diva stays true to her mantra of “designing with a purpose” and her work at Marktime Media clearly portrays that. She also plays the flute and used to be in a community band post-college.Every musical piece tells an underlying story. Similarly, Michelle starts her work by putting in extensive research and thought into it. Michelle is also one of heck of a speaker and you could possibly bump into her at a WordCamp or a meetup.

Though pink has a predominant influence over her personal website, her artwork is rather colorful and interesting. (Quick sneak – There’s a Star Wars inspired painting in the collection, go check it out..)

Among her favorites, she has special regard for one of her own plugin WP Draw Attention and the theme – Twenty Fifteen. Coming to the humans of WordPress, she deeply admires Alex Vasquez, the lead organizer of WordCamp Los Angeles.

Having said that, Natalie is also quite a sensation in LA, as she was the lead organizer of WordCamp LA 2013 and also the founder of Website Weekend 2013. Adding another feather to her hat, Natalie is also the founder of LA chapter of Girl Develop It. She spends hours every week running the LA chapter of Girl Develop It as that work is very important and meaningful to her.

From whatever Natalie has achieved, I feel Natalie is much more than a creative writer! What say?

Dee Teal

The Web Princess

Known for her enthusiastic approach, this Genesis developer is the brains behind meetups like WordChicks and Pressjam and is the co-organiser of the WordPress Melbourne User group. Dee’s mantra is “no regrets, no excuses” and this guides both how she runs her business, and how she communicates with her clients and trainees. Clear direction, honest communication and taking risks with confidence make her a highly sought after colleague. She believes that both success and failure are valuable.Dee is an author for WP Tuts and admires WordPressers who are giving back to the community to make WordPress a better place.

Dee heads her venture “The Web Princess” since 2009 and has recently worked on a project for XWP.

Not much of a surprise that Genesis Theme Framework is one of her favorites and among plugins Advanced Custom Fields is what gets her vote.

Tracy Levesque

Trainer, Business Owner, Diversity advocate

Tracy Levesque has many things going for herself. She is the co-owner of YIKES, Inc. – a Philadelphia web design and development agency. She is also associated with Girl Develop It’s local chapter, contributes to the training for WordPress, advocates diversity in tech, organizes and speaks at WordCamps and other events.Her Easy Forms for Mailchimp plugin is popular too – with more than 30k active installs and growing. Their company specializes in WordPress theme and plugin development and customizations apart from site monitoring, maintenance and eCommerce.

Tracy has been designing websites since 1996 but she started working with WordPress since 2006. Story goes somewhat like this: In 2005, their company was trying out different CMS platforms but she didn’t find anything that she really liked. And she wanted to start a baby blog when she got pregnant in 2006. That’s when she used WordPress and she fell in love with WordPress.

When asked which is the WordPress theme she loves, Tracy had no second thoughts before saying Underscores. Proof she uses it on all her projects.

Her clients love her for what she does. Tracy is particularly proud of the improvements she made to error messaging on admin forms. Though a small contribution, it does make her happy to know millions of people will have a better and easier user experience.

When not wrangling HTML and CSS, Tracy rides bikes, drinks coffee, eats sushi, and takes pictures of abandoned buildings. Or listens to indie rock. She is a drummer herself and loves going to live shows.

Tracy is also excellent at explaining things to the non-tech layperson, and that trait was super useful when she started contributing to the user training project for WordPress.org.

Marie Dodson

The Editing Wonder

‘Whatever you are, be a good one’ this quote by Abraham Lincoln has impacted many. And Marie Dodson of TorqueMag.io must be one of them.Apart from writing excellent editorials for Torque, Marie has a keen interest in the field of biology.

Among her noted works, is the success of the ebook WP REST API for which she collaborated with renowned authors like Josh Pollock and the guys at WP Engine.

Marie admits that, what truly fascinates her about the WordPress Community is it’s vitality. And if she has to pick her favorites, it will surely include the plugin Crayon Syntax Highlighter and the Ingrid Theme.

The intention of this story is to acknowledge and appreciate women in WordPress community. In no way is this a “top list” or anything like that. We’ve written the article to the best of our knowledge and from the information we gained interviewing many women. If you notice any inaccuracy or have a suggestion, let us know.

The caricatures – view them in a creative spirit. We haven’t met many of these women in person, all caricatures are an artist’s imagination, and we’ve highlighted non-WordPress passions. Take no offense!

We wanted to share stories of many more women, but couldn’t make this too long. But we truly respect and honor every woman in WordPress. (and man too!!)

So, here’s my invitation to you:

This is your chance to show gratitude to the WordPress women who helped you, guided you, inspired you… Simply, post a picture and write a few words of appreciation. Then tag the post with #wpwomen on Twitter/ Facebook/ the comment section below..

And yes, I have some amazing women on my team too. So let me do what I just asked you to: